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Alan Keyes's Daffy Idea to Repeal the 17th Amendment

by Lewis Gould
Mr. Gould, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, is writing a history of the Senate in the twentieth century.

Alan Keyes, the Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois, has now joined Senator Zell Miller of Georgia and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in calling for repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that provides for the direct election of United States senators. Senator Miller, who has introduced his own amendment to repeal the Seventeenth, contends that the direct election of senators “was the death of the careful balance between state and federal governments.” Once the Senate was the province of members “who thoughtfully make up their own minds, as they did during the Senate’s greatest era of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun.” Now senators, in Miller’s view, “are mere cat’s paws for the special interests.” Miller favors returning the right to elect senators to the state legislatures who had that job until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. Keyes agrees since it seems likely that the Illinois electorate is not going to prove receptive to his bid for that state’s open Senate seat. Before this flawed idea gets any traction, it would be well to recall the historical circumstances that led to the adoption of the direct election amendment in the first place.

Why did Americans in the Progressive Era endorse this change in the nation’s fundamental law? Put aside the senatorial giants that Miller mentions--- John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. Consider three lesser known figures in the history of the upper house—J. Edward Addicks, William A. Clark, and William Lorimer. Few history books devote more than a line or two to these three obscure gentlemen, but they were important players in the reason why the Seventeenth Amendment came into being.

By 1900 complaints about the way that United States senators were elected filled the press of the day. “The legislative system of electing Senators has broken down,” wrote a commentator in the Arena in 1905. Critics cited the senators who had recently been indicted and convicted of crimes, Joseph R. Burton of Kansas and John Mitchell of Oregon. Other senators such as Chauncey Depew of New York had been found to be on the payroll of corporations. There was in the Senate the general presence, as the Nation put it, of “those whose corruption or surrender to corporate interests has too long stained the reputation of a great legislative body.” Politicians associated with the Progressive Movement, such as William E. Borah of Idaho and Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas, argued that direct election represented a forward step toward cleaner politics when corruptible state legislatures gave way to the people.

Now to those three obscure men. William A. Clark was a wealthy silver miner from Montana whom the legislature in that state sent to the Senate in 1899. Subsequent investigation determined that he had spent more than $140,000 of his money bribing lawmakers in the legislature. After resigning his seat in early 1900, he was returned to the Senate by the Montana legislature under less sordid conditions. J. Edward Addicks was a millionaire from Pennsylvania who tried to buy himself a Senate seat from Delaware in the 1890s and early 1900s. Spreading his cash around, he put the state into a political turmoil that left it without one of its senators for several years. Finally, Senator William Lorimer received a majority of the votes from the Illinois legislature in 1909. Later revelations disclosed that bribery of some legislators had been a key part of Lorimer’s victory. The senator himself was not involved with the illegal acts, but the specter of “Lorimerism” convinced many citizens that legislatures were not the proper vehicles for selecting United States senators. In 1912 Lorimer was expelled from the Senate. By then the direct election of senators had become a constitutional amendment and was on its way to ratification.

The Seventeenth Amendment did not bring the new political morality to the Senate that its advocates had forecast. Many problems of campaign finance, corrupted elections, and the power of special interests remain to plague the Senate chamber. But a resolution of those issues will not occur by returning to a fancied golden age of senatorial excellence before the Seventeenth Amendment came on the scene. State legislatures are not the answer to improving the Senate any more than they were in 1900. Such a reversion might have the effect of reducing campaign expenses since the cost of influencing several dozen state lawmakers would be well below the current outlay for running a statewide election. Yet it is laughable, in light of the historical experience of a century ago, to suggest that a return to a system so susceptible to corruption, log-rolling, and the flouting of public opinion would be any kind of improvement over the present state of affairs. The contemporary problems of the Senate need to be addressed. Relying on the undemocratic methods that came before the Seventeenth Amendment provides no way to embark on the salutary process of reforming the Senate.